Motorola shakeup to cause industry trickle-down?

Motorola’s president, Ed Zander, stepped down and will be succeeded by Greg Brown. The company has been under pressure because of poor stock performance, and it is this that makes the departure of Mr. Zander interesting. There are many companies that Wall Street believes have not met shareholder appreciation goals, including Cisco, and the pressure for the change came as private equity companies were working with some board members and investors to break Motorola up to create several units whose combined performance would better suit shareholder goals. We believe that this kind of pressure will spawn aggressive product moves among other network companies in 2008 to prevent being fragmented.